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March 18, 2013

[In a recent survey of
more then 2,800 Indian students, the Center for the Advanced Study of India at
the University of Pennsylvania concluded that “aspirations of students are
largely misaligned with the needs of the Indian economy.” It said the
construction and automotive sectors are expected to need the most skilled
workers over the next decade, but “only a very small proportion” of students
want careers in those fields.]

By Rama Lakshmi

RAJHEDI, India — As India’s economy grows, cities expand and new
industries arise, officials and policy analysts are grappling with a key
question: Will Indians have the skills to build the new India?

By 2022, India will be short of
more than 103 million skilled workers in the infrastructure sector, about 35
million in the automobile industry and 33 million in construction. By contrast,
there is expected to be a shortage of only 5 million in the technology sector.

But as higher education has rapidly extended into towns and
villages across this massive nation — college enrollment tripled between 1991 and 2011 — so have
student aspirations to pursue the white-collar professions widely viewed as the
most respectable: medicine, teaching, business management, and software and
electronics engineering.

The result, researchers say, is that the professional goals of a
fast-growing body of educated youth are running ahead of the skills that India
will desperately need during the next decade of its economic transition. The
mismatch only adds to concerns that India’s swelling young population will
yield less of an advantageous “demographic dividend” and more of a demographic
disaster.

“Indian families tend to put a lot of emphasis on college degrees
as a tool of aspiration and growth,” said Dilip Chenoy, who heads the National
Skill Development Corporation, which was set up by the government four years
ago. “So what we have is a whole lot of people with degrees in hand but with no
relevant skills.”

In Rajhedi, a large farming village in the northern state of
Haryana, families today speak of skipping the incremental farm-to-factory
journey and instead express hope that their children will secure office jobs that
bring respect and social status.

Vanshika Sachdeva, a 12th grade high school student, is the first
in her family to speak fluent English. She rides a motorcycle, carries a
smartphone and plays volleyball. Her parents — her father is a wheat farmer and
her mother the village council chief — did not study beyond 10th grade in
school.

But when it comes to choice of career, Sachdeva defers to them.

“My parents want me to be an electronics engineer, and that is
what I will study in college,” Sachdeva said.

Rajhedi is in a district that boasts small- and medium-scale
industries comprising of sugar mills, plywood and machine parts manufacturing.
But Sachdeva’s parents’ choice for their daughter’s course work was not based
on research about the kinds of jobs that are available locally or elsewhere.

“We want an engineer in the family. There is a higher status
attached to the engineering degree,” said Anita Sachdeva, her 38-year-old
mother.

But she does not want her daughter to be a civil construction or
machine engineer. She wants her to work with electronic products, because she
hopes it will be a “respectable office job fit for women,” even though the
salaries may be similar.

A fearsome tide

In a recent survey of
more then 2,800 Indian students, the Center for the Advanced Study of India at
the University of Pennsylvania concluded that “aspirations of students are
largely misaligned with the needs of the Indian economy.” It said the
construction and automotive sectors are expected to need the most skilled
workers over the next decade, but “only a very small proportion” of students
want careers in those fields.

“There is an acute awareness gap about where the job opportunities
are,” said Megha Aggarwal, the lead author of the survey, to which 84 percent
of students responded that family elders guided them on education and career
choices. “The local industry is not doing enough to train and communicate with
the students or make their jobs attractive.”

One million Indians will enter the workforce every year for the
next two decades. More than half of India’s 1.2 billion people are under the
age of 25.

“If we don’t get our act together in time and employ them
gainfully, there will be a huge social and political problem in our hands,”
Chenoy said.

Facing that tide, the government has set itself the ambitious
target of giving employable skills to about half a billion Indians by 2022. The
government has begun upgrading hundreds of languishing vocational training
institutes with new industry-specific skills courses and setting up skills
development centers in partnership with businesses.

In February, the government announced that it will establish 300
U.S.-style community colleges that will offer short-duration courses
tailor-made for various industries.

Not too far from Rajhedi, plush-looking private engineering
colleges are mushrooming — dozens in the past decade. But India’s recent
software boom has led many more students to enroll in information technology
courses, widely seen as a ticket to upward mobility and a modern lifestyle,
than in the less glamorous engineering classes.

“Everybody said that software engineering is the path to the
future; we all rushed in like in a herd,” said Meena Rani, a 23-year-old
student of information technology. “Now I hear there is a glut in IT, and the
big opportunities are in civil engineering.”

Not only is there a mismatch, but there just are not enough jobs
being created to keep pace with the staggering number of graduates looking for
work. The rate of unemployment among Indian graduates is over 9 percent. It is
not uncommon to see degree holders working in malls as sales representatives,
earning very low salaries.

So much yet to be

Representatives of the local industries say that educated youths
only want jobs in the big cities. And across India, there is a yawning shortage
of skilled blue-collar manpower in textile factories, as well as construction
project foremen or machine operators.

That contributes to inordinate delays in implementing projects,
businesses say.

“Projects get delayed, we spend more money in training recruits,
we open our own colleges with specific courses for the skills we need,” said
Arun Bhagat, spokesman of a large Indian infrastructure company called GMR,
which builds power plants, highways and airports. “It is very difficult to find
skilled engineers to build and operate our power plants or manage the construction
of highways. They are in such a short supply that they just fly off the
shelves.”

Ravali Pothala, 21, is one such recruit who recognized the
opportunities. She is in her final year of civil engineering studies at GMR’s
college in the southern Indian village of Rajam, and she said she wants to
build highways, factories and bridges.

“There is an average of 50 new job openings for civil engineers
daily,” said Pothala. “The demand is high because India is growing, and so much
of infrastructure is yet to be created.”